Year in Review

Entropy Data: 2025 in Review

A look back at what we accomplished this year. A moment to say thank you. And also to look forward.

The Big One

This year marked a major milestone: we spun off from INNOQ and incorporated as Entropy Data GmbH in August 2025, co-founded by Jochen Christ and Simon Harrer.

We are deeply grateful to Phillip Ghadir, Martina Freers, and Oliver Wolf who believed in us and supported our idea from the very beginning to our spin-off and beyond. A heartfelt thank you to everybody at INNOQ for their unwavering support during our journey from the software world to the world of data & AI.

Company

What a first year, running our own business:

• We are bootstrapped, already profitable, and growing
• We serve customers worldwide across industries
• We have an incredible team

Rebrand & Evolution

• Data Mesh Manager is now Entropy Data - new name, same mission: bringing order to data chaos
• Redesigned the platform into Marketplace, Studio, and Governance, optimized for different personas
• Rebranded datacontract.com to explain what data contracts are, introduce ODCS, and showcase the Data Contract Editor and CLI

Open Standards Leadership

As members of the Bitol Technical Steering Committee at the Linux Foundation:

• Helped push ODCS 3.1 (Open Data Contract Standard) to release
• Helped push ODPS 1.0 (Open Data Product Standard) to release
• Deprecated our own Data Contract Specification in favor of the open standards

We are incredibly thankful to work alongside the wonderful people in the Bitol Technical Steering Committee at the Linux Foundation: Andrea Gioia, Andrew Jones, Andy Petrella, Atanas Iliev, Christian Foyer, Diego Carvallo, Dirk Van de Poel, Gene Stakhov, Jean-Georges Perrin, Martin Meermeyer, Peter Flook, and Tom De Wolf. Together, we share a common vision: success through open standards.

Recognition & Awards

• Data Contract CLI featured as tool 66 in the Thoughtworks Technology Radar Vol. 33 (November 2025), rated Trial and recommended for enterprise adoption
• Won the Data Product Challenge, a public sector innovation challenge where our platform stood out for enabling organizations to share data across departments while ensuring quality and GDPR compliance automatically

Customer Success

• GEODIS - using our data product catalog and marketplace to standardize documentation, improve discoverability, and build the future of logistics
• Kühne+Nagel - Maik Wurdel and Niels Hackius shared their Data Mesh journey, explaining how our data product marketplace helps them manage data products across their organization
• Novo Nordisk - Building a Data Marketplace at Scale: A Semantic Data Architecture

We are working on sharing more stories next year.

Research

• "Automating Data Governance with Generative AI" (AIES 2025) - explores how LLMs can support data governance by evaluating data access requests against company policies, with Arif Wider and Linus Dietz, and Martin Meermeyer and Matthias Wegmüller as industry experts
• "AI-Assisted Data Governance with Data Mesh Manager" (IEEE ICWS 2025) - introduces Governance AI, an LLM-based tool for evaluating data access requests based on policies, data types, and context, streamlining governance while maintaining compliance, with Arif Wider and Linus Dietz
• Paper on Data Product MCP (under review) - exploring how users can chat with their enterprise data, with Filippo Scaramuzza, Marco Tonnarelli, and Linus Dietz
• Paper on data contracts (in progress) with Arif Wider and Laura Schuiki

A warm thank you to Arif Wider, Linus Dietz, Filippo Scaramuzza, Marco Tonnarelli, and Laura Schuiki for the inspiring collaborations. We also appreciate the reviewers for their valuable feedback.

Open Source

• Data Contract Editor - a browser-based editor for creating and editing data contracts
• ODCS Excel Template - for collaborative data contract creation
• ODCS Python module - on PyPI for reading and writing ODCS files
• Data Contract CLI - our command-line tool for testing and managing data contracts

We are grateful to everyone who contributed, opened issues, and helped spread the word about our open source projects. Your support means the world to us.

Articles

• Data Contract: Trust in Data - an interactive website that explains what data contracts are, introduces ODCS, and shows how to create and manage data contracts with the Data Contract Editor and CLI
• Data Catalog vs Data Marketplace - explores why traditional data catalogs fall short and how data marketplaces with curated data products and data contracts solve the problem
• Data Marketplace: Make or Buy? - discusses the true cost of building custom data marketplaces, arguing that the real competitive edge lies in how you use data, not how you distribute it

Product Features

• First tool to support ODCS 3.1 and ODPS 1.0 (Open Data Product Standard) natively
• Native connectors for BigQuery, Databricks, Snowflake, and PostgreSQL
• MCP integration - chat with your enterprise data in natural language
• Drift detection for automatically detecting schema changes
• Git integration for version-controlled data contracts
• Native integration with the Data Contract Editor and CLI

Our roadmap is packed. We'll focus on the semantic layer next year.

Security & Compliance

• ISO 27001 certification in under 10 weeks, supported by Kertos, audited by Tempo Audits
• External pen-test by the well-renowned Christian Schneider
• Numerous security questionnaires and internal pen tests from customers

Conferences & Meetups

We presented and connected at many conferences and meetups this year:

• Data Mesh Live
• data2day
• Data Festival
• Several TDWI events with Michael Bok from Die Mobiliar on how they introduced data contracts
• APIdays Paris and London with Patrick Brosse from Amadeus on bringing the API world and the data world together
• Big Data London
• Big Data Europe Vilnius
• Software Architecture Summit
• INNOQ Technology Day
• POA Stuttgart (Data Product Oriented Architectures)
• "Scaling Data & AI Products" at Thoughtworks Berlin

A heartfelt thank you to all the organizers for having us, to Michael and Patrick for the wonderful collaborations on stage, and to everyone who attended our talks. We cherish all the great discussions, valuable feedback, and the kindness we experienced.

Webinars & Podcasts

• Code & Deploy (Intel) - "Data Contracts: Ensuring Reliable and Usable Data Products" with Ezequiel Lanza and Jean-Georges Perrin
• CASE Podcast - "Data Marketplace, Data Products and Data Contracts" with Alex Heusingfeld, Heinrich Hartmann, and Sven Johann
• Dataminded Podcast - "Data Contracts, AI, and the Next Phase of Data Mesh" with Kris Peeters
• Being a startup without VC with Arnas Bräutigam
• Datanosco - "From Data Contracts to Talking to your Data" with Stéphane Heckel
• TDWI Podcast (upcoming) - on data products, contracts, and MCP with Claudia Koschtial

We are grateful to all the hosts for inviting us and for the wonderful conversations. Every single one was a joy.

Team

(We should invest in a team photo, but we don't have one yet.)

Our team:

• Fabian Biberger - founding engineer and one of the key reasons for our success
• Jakob Schödl - delivering value since day one, making customers happy every week with yet another integration

From the bottom of our hearts, thank you, Fabian and Jakob, for your dedication, creativity, and for making Entropy Data what it is today. We couldn't have done it without you.

Thank You

Above all, a heartfelt thank you to our families. Without your patience, encouragement, and unwavering support, none of this would have been possible. We love you. ❤️

What's Next

We're excited about 2026 and the path ahead. We're hiring and will be even more present at conferences and through high-quality content online. We'll continue building a product we are proud of, nurturing great partnerships, and delighting our customers.